Prince’s Official Memoir to Be Published This Year

Prince's official memoir, written after a deal was struck just weeks before his death in 2016, will be published near the end of this year, his literary agent confirmed.

The project was announced in March 2016 with the title The Beautiful Ones and an original due date of last fall. “You all still read books, right?" Prince asked an audience at a New York club at the time. "My brother Dan [Piepenbring, a journalist] is helping with it. He’s a good critic. That’s what I need. Not a yes man.”

He added that the story begins with his earliest memory and goes “all the way to the Super Bowl,” which he played in 2007. Literary agent Esther Newberg of ICM Partners toldVarietyin a new interview that by the time of Prince’s death at the age of 57, he had submitted about 50 handwritten pages, which could be reproduced in the book when it’s published in time for the holiday season.

She noted that three editors had presented pitches to Prince during the same meeting at his Paisley Park complex. “It’s never been done before,” Newberg said. “Editors don’t like to be in the same room making their pitches to the same potential clients. We had to do it because I knew he would not want to meet individually with editors.”

The memoir will be published by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House. Prince said the publisher had “made me an offer I can’t refuse.”

The toxicology report on his death, which was revealed last month, confirmed that an "exceedingly high" amount of the synthetic opioid fentanyl was in his system when he died.